Synopsis

Thirty-five million Americans–one in eight–like to go fishing. Fly fishers have always considered themselves the aristocracy of the sport, and a small number of those devotees, a few thousand at most, insist upon using one device in the pursuit of their obsession: a handcrafted split-bamboo fly rod. Meeting this demand for perfection are the inheritors of a splendid art, one that reveres tradition while flouting obvious economic sense and reaches back through time to touch the hands of such figures as Theodore Roosevelt and Henry David Thoreau.

In Casting a Spell, George Black introduces readers to rapt artisans and the ultimate talismans of their uncompromising fascination: handmade bamboo fly rods. But this narrative is more than a story of obscure objects of desire. It opens a new vista onto a century and a half of modern American cultural history. With bold strokes and deft touches, Black explains how the ingenuity of craftsmen created a singular implement of leisure–and how geopolitics, economics, technology, and outrageous twists of fortune have all come to focus on the exquisitely crafted bamboo rod. We discover that the pastime of fly-fishing intersects with a mind-boggling variety of cultural trends, including conspicuous consumption, environmentalism, industrialization, and even cold war diplomacy.

Black takes us around the world, from the hidden trout streams of western Maine to a remote valley in Guangdong Province, China, where grows the singular species of bamboo known as tea stick–the very stuff of a superior fly rod. He introduces us to the men who created the tools and techniques for crafting exceptional rods and those who continue to carry the torch in the pursuit of the sublime. Never far from the surface are such overarching themes as the tension between mass production and individual excellence, and the evolving ways American society has defined, experienced, and expressed its relationship to the land.

Fly-fishing may seem a rarefied pursuit, and making fly rods might be a quixotic occupation, but this rich, fascinating narrative exposes the soul of an authentic part of America, and the great significance of little things. George Black’s latest expedition into a hidden corner of our culture is an utterly enchanting, illuminating, and enlightening experience.

From the Hardcover edition.

Excerpt

Chapter 1Wilderness with all the Comforts

My wife’s hometown, Stillwater, Oklahoma—population fortythousand, home of the Oklahoma State University Cowboys andthe National Wrestling Hall of Fame—is not the kind of place, atfirst blush, where you would expect a fly fisherman to have a lifechangingexperience. The old downtown is much like the core of alot of American towns whose original logic has been bypassed bytime and Wal-Mart. There are a few bars that cater to the studentclientele from OSU, a couple of banks, an upscale home-furnishingfranchise, a Christian bookstore or two, an ersatz Starbucks, someboarded-up storefronts, and a multidealer antiques mall, the kindyou see these days in almost every town of comparable size.The mall is much as you’d expect. Knickknacks and collectiblesof all sorts. The stuff Grandma left in her attic. Used books. Farmtools, costume jewelry, fifty-cent ties, incomplete sets of glassware.A room full of ticking wall clocks. Barbie dolls and Star Wars actionfigures, as the cutoff line for the term “antique” creepssteadily forward. And then a dealer’s stand I’d never noticed before:vintage fishing tackle.At this point I’d been fly-fishing for three or four years, I suppose—long enough to graduate to my first hundred-dollar graphitefly rod and make the transition (in my own mind, at least) fromrank beginner to semicompetent amateur—by which I mean thatonce in a while I even caught a few trout. So I stopped to take alook.In one corner of the booth was a narrow wooden box aboutthree feet long, its hinged lid secured with two brass clasps. Ipopped them open. Inside, boxwood partitions divided the con-tainer into several compartments, on much the same principle as acase of wine. Seven sections of hexagonal bamboo were nestledinto the notched dividers. The handle was reversible. There was astout butt section, two midsections, and three tips of varyingthicknesses. This meant you could configure the rod a couple ofdifferent ways, as either an eight-foot fly rod or a five-and-a-halffootbait caster—a kind of rod that is used for throwing heavierlures. This struck me as a neat arrangement.Each segment of the rod was coated in a deep cherry red lacquer.The ferrules—the male and female parts that connected thesections—gleamed as chrome-bright as the trim on an old Cadillac.The snake-shaped line guides were attached to the bamboowith silk thread windings in elaborate patterns of lime green andlemon yellow. The guides themselves were of some gold-coloredalloy. An inch or two above the cork grip, a lozenge-shaped acetatedecal depicted a snowcapped mountain, perhaps a volcano, againsta blue sky, with the initials “NFT.” You could be forgiven for callingthe whole thing gaudy, but to me it was magically redolent ofthe 1940s, a decade for which I’ve always felt a special affinity, perhapsbecause I was born at its tail end.Suffice it to say that I fell in love with this fly rod, even thoughit would end up jilting me. The price tag said $87.50. I paid cash.I fished the rod a couple of times that spring. Once I took it outon a smooth-flowing chalk stream in the south of England, whereit landed a handsome sixteen-inch rainbow trout. After that I usedit to catch some wild brook trout in Connecticut.Feeling quite pleased with myself, I took the rod into a local flyshop to get the reading of an expert. He took the pieces from thebox, sighted along each section in turn, put them together,squinted at them some more, made small humphing noises tohimself, then gave me a long, appraising look. “Well, it’s verypretty, isn’t it?” he said. “The lacquer’s nice, very decorative.”“But?” I said, knowing from his tone that the real verdict wasstill to come.“Well, of course, as a fly rod it’s worthless, it’s a piece of junk.”He pointed to the volcano decal. “NFT—Nippon Fishing Tackle.That’s Mount Fuji in the picture, I guess. They churned thesethings out by the thousands in Japan after World War Two, forG.I.’s to take home as souvenirs, mainly. It’s not even the right kindof bamboo. . . .”The man in the fly shop went on talking some more. I missedmost of it—no doubt because embarrassment had kicked in. ButI do remember the gleam in his eye, the lyricism in his voice,and the gist of what he said. The right kind of bamboo, he toldme, was something called Tonkin cane. The raw material wasChinese, but the art of transforming it into a fly rod was a peculiarlyAmerican accomplishment; and in the hands of a mastercraftsman . . . well, if I ever had the good fortune to experiencethe real thing—as opposed to the piece of junk I had justdumped on his counter—I would surely agree that it was a kindof perfection.I resolved then and there that I would go in search of this peculiarlyAmerican vision of perfection, never suspecting that itwould take me all the way back to Henry David Thoreau.In July 1857, Thoreau set out on his third journey from WaldenPond to the Maine woods. He’d traveled there for the first time in1846, to Bangor by railroad and steamship and thence up the WestBranch of the Penobscot River to Mount Katahdin, the secondhighest peak in New England. His second trip, in 1853, had takenhim via Moosehead to Chesuncook Lake. But it seems to have beena little anticlimactic after the ascent of Katahdin, which had inspiredhis celebrated meditation on raw nature assomething savage and awful, though beautiful. . . . Here wasno man’s garden, but the unhandselled globe. It was not lawn,nor pasture, nor mead, nor woodland, nor lea, nor arable, norwaste-land. It was the fresh and natural surface of the planetEarth, as it was made for ever and ever.Thoreau and his companions dined on Maine brook trout,freshly caught. “In the night,” he wrote, “I dreamed of trout fishing;when at length I awoke, it seemed a fabled myth this paintedfish swam there, so near by couch, and rose to our hooks the lastevening, and I doubted if I had not dreamed it all.”There was something restless and improvised about Thoreau’sthird trip to Maine, and he was debating his itinerary right up tothe last minute. At first he considered exploring the Saint JohnRiver from its source to its mouth, but then he changed his mind,opting instead for Moosehead, the lakes of the Saint John, and thePenobscot again. Just nine days before he left Concord, he was stillcasting around for a traveling companion. He wrote to his cousinGeorge Thatcher, of Bangor, asking for suggestions. Perhaps hisnephew Charles would agree to join him, since he had “somefresh, as well as salt, water experience?” But in the end, Thoreausettled on his Concord neighbor Edward Hoar, late of California.The interesting thing about Thoreau’s account of this thirdjourney is that Hoar—his companion for 60 miles by stagecoach,another 265 by canoe, and twelve rough nights under canvas—isvirtually invisible, never once mentioned by name. From Thoreau’ssubsequent correspondence, you can infer that his neighbor was abit of a pain. Two weeks after his return to Concord, Thoreauwrote to a friend that Hoar had “suffered considerably from beingobliged to carry unusual loads over wet and rough ‘carries.’ ” Hoarcame back from Bangor with a set of moose antlers, a gift fromGeorge Thatcher, which he used as a hat stand, and that’s the lastwe hear of him.In contrast, another character, with whom Thoreau had onlythe briefest of encounters, positively leaps from the page. It wasJuly 23, and Thoreau, Hoar, and their Penobscot Indian guide, JoePolis, had just boarded the stage that would take them from Bangorto the remote outpost of Greenville, which lies at the foot ofMoosehead Lake.Given the number of guns on display in the coach, Thoreauwrote, “you would have thought that we were prepared to run thegauntlet of a band of robbers.” But it turned out that the occupantswere the members of a hunting party who were embarkingon a six-week trip to the Restigouche River and Chaleur Bay, inthe remotest reaches of the Canadian province of New Brunswick.Their leader was a handsome man about thirty years old, ofgood height, but not apparently robust, of gentlemanly addressand faultless toilet; such a one as you might expect tomeet on Broadway. In fact, in the popular sense of the word,he was the most “gentlemanly” appearing man in the stage,or that we saw on the road. He had a fair white complexion,as if he had always lived in the shade, and an intellectualface, and with his quiet manners might have passed for a divinitystudent who had seen something of the world.Thoreau subsequently discovered that appearances were deceptive.Far from being a divinity student, his coach mate was infact a celebrated gunsmith, and “probably the chief white hunterof Maine.” But he never learned the man’s name, which wasHiram Lewis Leonard.Leonard belongs to that great American series of heroic archetypes—the lineage that includes Johnny Appleseed and HoratioAlger, but above all Daniel Boone and Natty Bumppo. One historiandescribed him as “a millwright, gunsmith, daguerrotypist,flutist, trapper, moose hunter, taxidermist, and one of the veryearly manufacturers of split bamboo fishing rods”—which we’llcome to in a moment. You could add a string of other accomplishmentsto that list: Leonard was also an expert canoeist, a fur trader,a pioneering fish culturist who was one of the first people to breedsalmon in a hatchery, and a gifted self-taught civil engineer whowas put in charge of the machinery department of the PennsylvaniaCoal Company when he was still in his teens. On top of all thatthere was his physical bravery. As Thoreau’s coach to Greenvillecrossed the Piscataquis River, his companions told him the story ofhow, during the previous spring, Leonard had plunged into thefrigid, swollen waters of a nearby brook to rescue a Mr. Stoddard,the owner of the Bangor-to-Moosehead stage, from drowning.The Leonards were one of those old New England familieswho could trace their ancestry back to the Mayflower, specificallyto three brothers who traveled together from England and settledin Massachusetts. After a dismal spell as a sheep farmer, Hiram’sfather, Lewis Leonard, became a master oar maker, leading a peripateticlife that took him from one stand of native ash trees to another—Sebec, Maine (where Hiram was born in 1831); Ellenville,New York; and Honesdale, Pennsylvania—moving on each timethe supply of raw material for his oars was exhausted. Hiram’syounger brother Alvin joined his father in the family business, andtogether they became the most celebrated makers of racing oars inthe country, their fame spreading even to England. A family diaryrecords that Lewis and Alvin “made nearly all of the oars usedby the professional rowers of the country and most of the notedamateurs.”Many of the Bumppo-flavored legends about Leonard comefrom his obituaries and postmortem reminiscences, and I supposesuch accounts should always be taken with a grain of salt. They’reevocative, nonetheless.In the woods he always carried his flute with him and playedit well. Many is the night I heard him wake the wildernesswith “Nellie Gray,” “The Irish Washerwoman,” “Old KentuckyHome,” and other tunes now seldom heard.Mr. Leonard’s powers of endurance were beyond belief,judging from appearances. He never seemed tired and wouldtramp all day through the forest, returning at night seeminglyfresh.The men are scarce who could carry as heavy a load as longa distance as he could. In 1856 he carried a quarter of mooseweighing 135 pounds from Little Spencer Pond to LobsterLake, a distance of seven miles.Thoreau himself had struggled to combat ill health with boutsof intense physical activity. As he wrote to his cousin GeorgeThatcher, his decision to undertake a third journey to the Mainewoods was the result of “finding myself somewhat stronger thanfor 2 or 3 years past.” It’s hard, then, not to imagine that it wasLeonard’s combination of physical prowess and apparent frailty(“a fair white complexion, as if he had always lived in the shade”)that made such a powerful impression on the naturalist.The fact was that Leonard’s health had always been delicate.His first problems were respiratory, and there’s some speculationthat this may have been the result of exposure to coal dust duringhis stint with the Pennsylvania Coal Company. Then, not longafter his encounter with Thoreau and his marriage to Lizzie Head,a classically educated minor poet who knew French, Latin, andHebrew, Leonard contracted measles—not a laughing matter inan adult. His doctor advised Leonard and Lizzie to move awayfrom Bangor and live full-time in the woods.That’s of some significance, I think, because traffic into thewilderness for health reasons—otherwise known as “taking theairs”—was beginning to be a fad. The doctor’s prescription was anearly hint that the Maine woods, in this period leading up to theCivil War, were not quite as “unhandselled” as Thoreau (not tomention his later fans) liked to imagine. There are plenty of otherclues to this in Thoreau’s own account of his travels. Paddlingacross the lakes of Piscataquis County, he was struck by the radicalfluctuations in water level that had left miles of dead and exposedstumps along the lakeshore. To reach the raging currents of Webster Stream—the “thunder-spout” where he and the Indian guideJoe Polis spent a cold and anxious night separated from EdwardHoar—Thoreau had first to navigate a mile-long artificial canalthat had been dug at the outlet of Telos Lake. Both the Telos canaland the dead stumps were, in fact, visible symptoms of the impactof the logging industry, which had tampered extensively withMaine’s waterways in order to sluice its product efficiently fromforest to market.Maine, you might say, was fast becoming an idea as well as aplace. The timber industry was responsible for most of the scars,but it opened roads that others quickly followed. The Victorianupper-middle classes converged on the Maine woods from thethree great urban centers of the East Coast—Boston, New York,and Philadelphia. These people had both means and motive. Theyhad plenty of disposable income; they were eager to escape fromthe summer heat and pollution of the cities (much of it caused, nodoubt, by the industries they owned and operated); and they wereenthusiastic converts to the cult of the outdoors, in part becausethey had absorbed Thoreau’s message that urban life had madethem soft and corrupt and alienated them from the natural world.For this WASP gentry, Maine summers were partly a matter ofaesthetics, partly an opportunity for adventure, and partly a reflectionof status. The leading men of the time were in thrall to socialDarwinism, seeing nature both as a source of wealth and as a challengeto be overcome if civilization was to move forward. But inMaine they also found, in the words of the environmental historianMax Oelschlager, that “wild nature still offer[ed] opportunityfor contemplative encounters, occasions for human beings to reflecton life and cosmos, on meaning and significance that transcendsthe culturally relative categories of modern existence.” Andas they grew attuned to the ancient rhythms of these wild places,they became avid recruits for the first stirrings of conservationism.In the process, they invented something that would come to becalled outdoor recreation. These people didn’t just walk, theyhiked, and the purpose of the exercise was something differentfrom and more profound than simply getting from point A to pointB. In the world they created, hunting and fishing were no longerjust means of obtaining protein; they were a hobby, a sport. Andmen like Hiram Leonard were there to provide them with thetools they required, which would be nothing but the best, withmoney no object.The “sports” also needed an infrastructure, of course. Theyneeded to be housed and fed. Contemplative encounters with naturewere all well and good, but leaky tents had limited appeal.The rudiments of this infrastructure had been there since themid-1840s, when the timber companies began constructing astring of sluice dams above and below Lake Wellekennebacook(today’s Lower Richardson Lake)—Upper Dam, Middle Dam,and Lower Dam—to facilitate their log drives. These were lonelyplaces: as a condition of employment, the dam keeper had to be amarried man, so that a second person would be on hand in case ofaccident or injury.The radical man-made change in the lake level flooded out apicturesque character named Joshua Rich, who was living in deepsolitude on a point of land off Metallak Island, hunting, fishing,and trapping game, some of which he shipped out as researchspecimens to Louis Agassiz at his Museum of Comparative Zoologyin Cambridge, Massachusetts. After the flood, Rich decampedto Middle Dam, where he found some dilapidated huts that hadbeen thrown together to house the workers who built the sluice.Rich considered the dam, considered the huts, considered the giganticnative brook trout that teemed in the lake—Thoreau’s“painted fish”—and a lightbulb went on. He built some cabinsand called the place Angler’s Retreat.The classic early account of Joshua Rich’s camp was written in1864 by a physician named Elisha Lewis. He reached Middle Damon the steamer Union, which hissed and clanked its way acrossLake Umbagog at five miles per hour, steam pouring from itsleaky boiler, wreathed in the smoke of burning hemlock logs. InDr. Lewis’s description, the Union was a craftmore curious and ingenious in its conception than anythingwhich had yet been constructed on our seaboard . . . a nondescriptabortion or cross between a mud-scow and a locomotive;it might very properly, in accordance with naval nomenclature,have been christened a hermaphrodite locomotive.Although Joshua Rich livened up the evenings with “hisrecital of wild adventures with deer, wolves, bears, caribou, panthers,moose and elk,” Dr. Lewis made it clear that the Angler’sRetreat was not yet the Waldorf-Astoria:Soon after our arrival we were informed that the Camp waspoorly supplied with food—nothing to be had in the way ofedibles save slices of strong-tasted [sic] pork fried with toughbread. I must confess I was quite startled by this announcement,in consideration of the beautiful visions of wild-game,corn-cakes, hot buckwheats, ham and eggs, and other like delicacieswhich Mr. Rich’s flaming circular had conjured up inmy mind’s eye.The help also left a lot to be desired. The doctor complainedabout the “sulky guides” and the “impertinence from the campboyand boorish incivility on the part of the half-tipsy maître decuisine” (though, to be fair, camp cooks in the Maine woods probablyweren’t accustomed to being thought of as maîtres de cuisine).At the end of his stay, Dr. Lewis offered the proprietor of the Angler’sRetreat some parting advice.Mr. Rich, if he really wishes to make his camp a resort forsportsmen and tourists, should engage the services of a cou-ple of middle-aged, steady women, one as a cook, the other ashousemaid and waiter, and not be dependent on low, foulmouthedship scullions and saucy, dirty boys for such duties.He should teach his gentlemanly guides to be civil, patient,good-natured and obliging, and above all, should have themunder proper control, and under no circumstances permitthem or his kitchen scullions to bully and control him. . . .When such arrangements are made, I will be glad to visit“The Angler’s Retreat” once more.Ouch.Over time the accommodations did improve, especially afterRich sold out to new owners. By 1879, a flier was promising that“all the sleeping rooms are nicely finished, lathed and plastered.”It was no longer just the gentleman “sports” who came to thebooming camps. Maine was now becoming an enticing vacationspot for the entire family, and the demand for comfort increasedaccordingly. In 1887, after the Angler’s Retreat was taken over bythe Androscoggin Lakes Transportation Company, a brochurepainted this picture of what the visitor could expect for $2 a night:The house contains sleeping accommodations for forty people,the rooms being furnished with handsome bedsteads,woven wire springs, and 40-lb hair mattresses. The ladies’ sittingroom, dining-room, office etc. are conveniently located onthe first floor, and long, roomy piazzas, overlooking the lake,offer a pleasant retreat for the idlers.Of course, hordes of tourists don’t materialize in a place byspontaneous generation. First they have to be identified, solicited,cultivated, flattered. The place itself, the destination, has to bepackaged and sold. In the last two decades of the nineteenth centuryand the early years of the twentieth, the state of Maine wasthe object of an aggressive marketing and branding campaign,largely driven by the expansion of the railroads. The Bangor,Aroostook, and Maine Central reached Moosehead Lake in 1884;ten years later a narrow-gauge line cut the travel time from Bostonto the Rangeley Lakes to ten hours. The discerning, well-heeledvisitor would be whisked away to a tranquil, balsam-scented paradise—“wilderness with all the comforts.” The Gilded Age wouldcome to the Maine woods, which would be transformed into the“Play Ground of the Nation.”The person who coined this slogan was a singular characternamed Cornelia Thurza Crosby. Born in 1854 in the tiny westernMaine town of Phillips, Crosby had succumbed to tuberculosis asa young woman. Like Hiram Leonard, she followed her doctor’sadvice to trust in “the healing power of nature.” Out in the woods,she quickly made her reputation as a sharpshooter, the first womanever to bag a caribou and an intimate friend of Annie Oakley. Buttrout fishing was her consuming passion. While recuperating fromher illness, Crosby caught her first brook trout with an alder pole,and she never looked back. By 1891 she was famous as the womanwho had broken all records by catching fifty-two trout in fortyfourminutes. She acquired the nickname “Fly Rod,” and it stuck.Fly Rod Crosby cut a memorable figure in her knee-lengthleather boots, navy blue serge suit, red felt hat, and midlengthskirt, which was furnished with an assortment of concealed hooksand eyes to keep it from trailing in the mud. “It is the easiest thingin life to describe me,” she wrote. “I am a plain woman of uncertainage, standing six feet in my stockings. I scribble a bit for varioussporting journals, and I would rather fish any day than go toheaven.” (The last comment, while perfectly understandable, gother in trouble later in life when she converted to Catholicism.)Each spring Fly Rod took her Maine exhibit to the AnnualSportsmen’s Exposition at Madison Square Garden in New York. Itwas quite a package. She brought live specimens of trout andsalmon in specially designed, air-cooled railcars supplied by theU.S. government. She brought the finest examples of Maine taxidermy.She brought spruce gum samples and prize potatoes and,on one occasion, a 107-pound squash. The centerpiece of the exhibitwas always a peeled-log cabin—Camp Oquossoc one year,Camp Rangeley or Camp Penobscot the next—its walls decoratedwith all manner of rods, nets, and snowshoes, dead antlered animalsand giant mounted trout. Owls and eagles perched on theroof. Stuffed cougars bared their teeth, looking real enough to takea bite out of your leg. Fly Rod acted out scenes of camp life, whileMrs. Etta Dill demonstrated her skills at the fly-tying bench,Penobscot Indians in full regalia wove baskets, and fishing guideswith bristling mustachios stood around holding canoe paddles andlooking exotic and vaguely menacingAlthough the railroad was Crosby’s main backer and the principalbeneficiary of her efforts, she rarely if ever mentioned it directly.The “Play Ground of the Nation” campaign was a triumphof indirection in advertising. Fly Rod didn’t spend time describingthe punctuality of the Maine Central or the luxury of its Pullmancars; instead, she concentrated on the enticements of the destination,knowing full well that her audience had only one way to getthere.And they came by the thousands. By the end of the centurythere were dozens of sporting camps–cum–resort hotels in theMaine woods, most of them concentrated in the Rangeley Lakesarea. Hard fried pork was a distant memory. This was an era ofcandlelit dinners and white linen, and the menu at the Angler’sRetreat offered all the fare that Elisha Lewis had hoped for, plusfresh oranges and bananas, lyonnaise potatoes, sirloin steak, lambchops, tenderloin, and honeycomb tripe.And the fishing . . . the fishing was all that Joshua Rich hadpromised. Six-pound, seven-pound, even eight-pound brook troutabounded in the Rangeley Lakes and in the Rapid River, whichsnarled its way down through five miles of whitewater from Midwildernessdle Dam to Lake Umbagog. Visitors penciled details of their catchon the cabin walls. One party from Smithville, New Jersey, reportedthey had landed five hundred pounds of trout. (“SmithvilleHogs,” someone else scrawled underneath.) Others pinned up outlinedrawings of their biggest catches on panels of birch bark. Andat night, when they retired, the “sports” hung their rods on pegson the rough board walls of the Angler’s Retreat. There were“rods of high and low degree,” one visitor reported. But the finestof them were made by Hiram Leonard.

About George Black

George Black did not pick up a fly rod till after his fortieth birthday–and he has seldom willingly put one down since. He was born in the small Scottish mining town of Cowdenbeath and was educated at Oxford University. Black is the author of four other books, including The Trout Pool Paradox: The American Lives of Three Rivers. A journalist and editor for more than twenty-five years, he has written for The New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, The Nation, The New Statesman, Mother Jones, The National Law Journal, Fly Fisherman, and many other publications. He lives in New York City with his wife, the author and playwright Anne Nelson, and their two children.